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enEric Wilson, Romantic Turbulence: Chaos, Ecology and American Spacehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/eric-wilson-romantic-turbulence-chaos-ecology-and-american-space
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">Eric Wilson, <em>Romantic Turbulence: Chaos, Ecology and American Space</em>. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. xxii. + 169 pp. $49. 95 (Hdbk; ISBN 0-312-22882-1).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
John Parham<br />
Thames Valley University, UK</h3>
<p>Eric Wilson’s <em>Romantic Turbulence</em> is a helpful addition to ecocritical work, offering not only a new perspective on American Romanticism but, more generally, a sophisticated, dialectical understanding of the ecology articulated out of that tradition.</p>
<p>Wilson’s primary argument is founded upon a detailed acquaintance with both contemporary ecological science and critical cultural theory. Drawing from these currents of thought, the conceptual paradigm that undergirds this book is a new organicism of “agitated processes,” which eschews the (still) prevailing notions in ecological science of balance or harmony (4). Wilson defines this as a conception of nature shaped by antagonistic forces of chaos and order, the interaction of which equates with life. Without order nature “would dissolve into a formless mass,” without chance “the second law of thermodynamics would run the universe down to heat death,” an interesting argument he develops from C. S. Pierce and Prigogine and Stengers (142). This paradigm of dialectical ecology is not new, even to ecocriticism. It dominates recent, second generation work such as Greg Garrard’s <em>Ecocriticism</em> (2004), and the attempt to establish a trajectory of ecological thinking around the Romantics is also a familiar one. What is distinctive, however, is the combination of the two and, in this, the book does what all good historical ecocriticism ought to do: it legitimates ecological thinking as part of a longer, alternative tradition in western literature, culture and philosophy that exists, and has value, independently of concerns about (say) global warming.</p>
<p>Wilson places the five writers considered in the book – Emerson, Fuller, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman – within the tradition of dialectical proto-ecological thinking via an impressive, expansive intellectual history reminiscent of the work of Laurence Buell. Wilson’s writers sit “almost exactly in the middle” of that tradition which, as he argues, encompasses the early Gnostics and the Greek Philosophers (Thales, Heraclitus, Ovid), European Romantic philosophers such as Goethe and Coleridge, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and a host of contemporary theorists including Serres, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari (8). Having placed the American Romantics within this history of ideas he then connects them thematically to emergent, contemporaneous scientific ideas – electromagnetic waves, atomism, evolution, energy physics – that were to shape ecological science. So, for example, Emerson is seen, in opposition to “traditional readings,” as representing a notion of the “physical sublime” that arose from the science of Davy and Faraday and would replace its equivalent, the “transcendentalist sublime” (xxi). What Wilson also gives us, however, is a notion of how literature <em>per se</em> might articulate, and help us understand, ecological nature.</p>
<!--break--><p>“Chaos ‘re-enchants’ human perspectives on the cosmos” (7) - but to articulate such enchantment requires what Heidegger, in <em>Being and Time</em>, called “rich thinking.” This is a notion similar to long-standing arguments about poetry – the view, for example, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that “poetry has tasked the highest powers of man’s mind”<a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a> – that has been repeated more recently by Heideggerian critics such as Jonathan Bate who, in <em>The Song of the Earth</em>, draws upon Gary Snyder’s analogy of art and the climax ecosystem to suggest that poetry expresses “the richest thoughts and feelings of a community.”<a href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a> Counselling us to “recall that Goethe claimed that denotative language was entirely inadequate to limn the teeming energies of life,” Wilson applies these ideas to the prose of his writers through Schiller’s notion of a “play drive” (19).</p>
<p>Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” (1795), Wilson reports, had argued “that man achieves his fullest potential as thinker and artist by placing his sense drive (<em>Stofftrieb</em>) (his impulse toward nature, the finite, change) and his formal drive (<em>Formtrieb</em>) (his desire for spirit, the infinite, stasis) into conversation. The result is the play drive (<em>Spieltrieb</em>), the artistic impulse” (64). Wilson suggests that American Romantic writers combined “the rigor of positivistic science with the play of poetry” (132-3) in works that “essay[ed] to inspire an experience of ecological seeing, to be the currents of nature” (19). Consistent with this sentiment, the bulk of this book is designed to demonstrate, through chapters on individual authors, how a “hidden current of the Romantic Age, the neglected ‘unground’ of organicism” was conveyed in both senses: thematically, and by means of the rhythm, structure, and sound of the work itself (22).</p>
<p>With each of his canonical writers representing what Wilson calls a “diversity as unity,” the thematic articulation of an organicism of “agitated processes” takes various forms (xxxi). Emerson, we learn, is emblematic of Lyotard’s notion of a “paralogical” writer possessed of sublime energies beyond reason and logic, and drew upon these energies to posit a dialectical nature that was “<em>one thing and the other thing</em>, in the same moment” (36). Fuller, correspondingly, judges what Wilson contentiously describes as Goethe’s belief that nature is too unruly to be governed by a single form against the observations from her 1843 Western tour documented in <em>Summer on the Lakes</em>. He reads <em>Moby Dick</em> in the light of what Stephen Jay Gould has identified as a chaotic dimension to natural selection, and Whitman’s <em>Leaves of Grass</em> by means of an ecological rendering of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome. A “living image of the living world,” Wilson describes this in more detail as “a subterranean, horizontal stem possessing no central root, growing several directions at once” that gives rise, in turn, to the central principles of “turbulence”: a “connection and heterogeneity” that agglomerates rather than unifies; multiplicity and equality; rupture and renewal (121).</p>
<p>The interest of these writers in the scientific ideas from which there arose a new, more dialectical, organicism brought about a writing, Wilson argues, that was designed to embody and literally to “<em>be</em> the currents of nature.” This includes Emerson’s interests in etymology, clustered around the idea that words originate out of nature and natural processes and so carry the sense of a nature that is never stable, which Wilson finds exemplified by Thoreau’s fluid argument in <em>A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers</em> that “The world is made out of water [and] Word is made out of world” (117). It is most evident, however, in Whitman’s deployment of grass to articulate rhizomatic nature in the poem later entitled “Song of Myself.” This Wilson explains as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Whitman’s poem, in content and form, is literally a rhizomatic, nomadic field of grass, a sprawling, evolving ecosystem in which parts and whole enter into perpetual and unpredictable conversation. Its parts (cells and organs; tropes and figures) suddenly swerve into new combinations that alter the living currents of the whole (the abyss of life; the overall composition); this fresh whole in turn affects the dispositions of the parts, forcing them to leap into further novel forms that will again change the whole. (119)</p></blockquote>
<p>The two main aspects of Wilson’s study – the establishment of American Romanticism as central to a historical trajectory of ecological consciousness, and the indication of those literary forms that might embody such an understanding – are augmented by two subsidiary arguments that extend the ecocritical compass of the book. The first is an understanding of landscape as an influence both on how we view nature and on the development of an appropriate aesthetic. Throughout the book Wilson describes American Romanticism as having emerged from the “cultural emptiness of the American Wild” – empty, that is to say, of “Western visions of nature” (xv). It is this, he suggests, that led to an intrinsic understanding of the wildness of nature best illustrated by Whitman’s rhizomatic poetry. The second is contained in the argument that Thoreau’s ecological thinking went further than that of the three preceding writers, and that Whitman’s, in turn, went furthest of all. This reminds us of another, often neglected, point about ecocriticism: that while these writers might have been “discovering scientific truth long before scientists got around to it” we nevertheless cannot divorce ecological thinking from the development of scientific ideas (129). There is, in other words, a trajectory of thinking that might guide us in seeking out those literary contexts that could most usefully shape our own ecological thinking (such as the developments in the UK of the perspectives of “romantic ecology” by later Victorian writers).</p>
<p>For all that, there are minor irritations and one substantial point that undermine a crucial element of the book. The minor irritants include occasional misprints. These can be humorous – such as Fuller “claming that the oppression of women is arbitrary” (56) – but also more serious, as when Wilson, in noting common ground between Goethe, Darwin and Nietzsche suggests that these connections “cannot be pushed too far.” He means, in fact, that they can (84). Secondly, the use of the male subject to describe the “gnostic ecologist” could be put down to anachronistic conventionalism, but not when Wilson chooses to illustrate the play between order and chaos through the analogy of a woman. Sentences like “As the woman, so the cosmos: a web of differentiated beings, some more conscious and complex than others” seem outmoded, insensitive, even ridiculous in the wake of ecofeminist criticism of the tendency to essentialize woman as nature (13).</p>
<p>My biggest complaint, however, is that Wilson’s eagerness to map a detailed intellectual history ultimately occurs at the expense of a corresponding literary exposition. The chapter on Fuller contains, for example, long sections on Ovid and German Romanticism, that on Melville, Early Greek thinking and Darwinism. This gives the book a somewhat dry character but, crucially, also undermines a fundamental element of his argument. Wilson claims, as we have seen, that Whitman’s "Song of Myself" is “literally […] rhizomatic” and has passages that “suddenly swerve into new combinations that alter the living currents of the whole.” Yet this is not substantiated by the sparse quotations he offers. There is no quotation of more than five lines and, therefore, no evidence as to how far the “turbulence” of “agitated processes” actually did permeate or construct the texts. We are denied the opportunity to respond to the rhizomatic nature that is, we are told, presented by Whitman.</p>
<p>Wilson convincingly elaborates and illuminates the deep connection between the American Romantics and a tradition of dialectical ecological thinking, a connection that he valuably asserts in the face of a continued temptation to embrace outmoded notions of balance or harmony. But it is a shame that we never get to see the moments at which this “leaps” from the page and sings to the reader. For that, surely, is the point of reading and enjoying Romantic literature.</p>
<p><sup>1</sup>Gerard Manley Hopkins, <em>The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins</em>, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 85.<br /><sup>2</sup>Jonathan Bate, <em>The Song of the Earth</em> (London: Picador, 2000), 246-7.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/parham-john">Parham, John</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/eric-wilson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Wilson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/john-parham" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Parham</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/668" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">ecocriticism</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/laurence-buell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Laurence Buell</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-parham" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Parham</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gerard-manley-hopkins" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gerard Manley Hopkins</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jonathan-bate" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jonathan Bate</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/eric-wilson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Wilson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/greg-garrard" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greg Garrard</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:55:17 +0000JackCragwall22445 at http://www.rc.umd.eduSusan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writinghttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/susan-manning-fragments-union-making-connections-scottish-and-american-writing
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">Susan Manning, <em>Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing</em>. New York: Palgrave, 2002. vii + 249 pp. Illus.: 7 halftones. £55.00/$69.95 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-333-76025-5).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Janet Sorensen<br />
Indiana University, Bloomington</h3>
<p>Scotland, once relegated to the margins of studies in Romanticism, has reemerged in recent scholarship as a geographical and intellectual site that at once anticipated key Romantic topoi and provided the conceptual basis of much Romantic cultural theory. Susan Manning's contribution to these studies is the most theoretically sophisticated and wide-ranging to date, moving fluidly between cultural politics, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic methodologies and traversing Scottish and American texts produced between the 1707 Act of Union and the American Civil War. At all points hesitant to identify causal relationships between specific political and cultural circumstances and the philosophical thought she outlines, Manning nonetheless makes a convincing argument regarding the significance of the post-Culloden Scottish intellectual milieu to subsequent Romantic motifs of fragmentation, of structural dismemberment, of incomplete memory, of unregistered mourning, and to the unstable narratives of union designed to acknowledge and sometimes overcome these threats to personal and national identity. In her discussion of the Scottish and North American literary negotiations of such fraught narratives, Manning profoundly complicates the very notion of national Romantic traditions. Temporally, she reveals links between Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic thought, particularly through her focus on David Hume and the Common Sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid, who sought to discredit Hume but unwittingly propelled his views into the future. Spatially, she demonstrates the intricate connections between Scottish and North American writing as she describes how that most American "structure of thinking," <em>e pluribus unum</em>, is "characteristic of the writing of the Scottish Enlightenment" (2).</p>
<p>As Manning notes, she is not the first to call attention to the close ties between Scottish and North American thought, nor is she the first to track the centrality of motifs of fragmentation in Romanticism as well as in an expanded understanding of Enlightenment thought. She is, however, the first to put the two together, thinking through the implications of the troubled Scots/English union and the American War of Independence and the ever-present possibility of state secession for rhetorics of identity, fragmentation, and union. Manning invites us, for instance, to consider Hume's narrative of human understanding, in which seeming union is in fact an association of fragments of meaning, as Hume put it in his <em>Treatise</em>--"what we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions" (cited 37)--in relation to Queen Anne's instruction to the Marquis of Queensberry to block any move in Scottish Parliament toward a federal union. As debates raged, in both Britain and the colonies, between two models of union, aggregative and federal or hierarchical and incorporative, Hume's assertion of union as association, as an imaginary principle, a fiction, might be said to resist that latter model of union.</p>
<p>When Manning poses these two models of union in grammatical terms, she refers to the federal as structured by an hypotactic syntax and to the incorporative model as a paratactic syntax. These two terms inform her analysis of the multi-layered meanings of "and" or, more concretely, of intricate and multi-faceted narratives of union, throughout the book. Manning's work is particularly distinguished in its emphasis on language, grammar and rhetoric as she tracks the tensions between fragmentation and union in language and narrative structure of analogous Scottish and American texts. The emphasis on grammatical structure allows her to pursue her interest in "'transitive structures' which propagate and translate themselves as ways of thinking and formulating ideas in a more diffuse but also a more precise way than consciously held political beliefs" (9). Thus, Hume, who was "clearly pro-Union" (34), might also register resistance to an incorporative model of union--and underscore the fictionality of all unions--in his grammar of mind. Manning's focus on syntax and grammar is further validated by the peculiar self-consciousness Americans and Scots, including Hume, had about language; speakers and writers from England's "peripheries" suffered from acute anxieties regarding the "naturalness" of their use of English.</p>
<p>While her observation that "debates about political [and, as she argues elsewhere, personal] identity cannot be separated from questions of syntax and semantics" (10) has affinities with twentieth-century post-structuralist thought, then, that link also reflects specific historical situations, not least of which was an eighteenth-century insistence on the connection between structures of language and mind. Manning's use of language and grammatical structure as a way into her analysis of Scottish and American texts becomes a means of both situating the concepts under study within a specific historical context and broadening the discussion to more abstract terms of the promise and limitations of language and narrative. Chapters on personal, spatial, historical, and national linguistic narratives of identity elegantly include both transhistorical and historically specific approaches grounded in the writings and contexts of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. A chapter on narratives of personal identity considers both the project of subject formation in the face of parental authority and the specifics of James Boswell's and Benjamin Franklin's different social historical contexts and respective strategies of composing themselves in distinct journal styles. Another chapter on creating identity through mapping space tracks the general project of "defining the known against the unknown, the industrious against the indolent," but the chapter also takes up peripheral writers'--be they Scots like James Thompson or American colonialists like William Byrd--concerns regarding the danger of self-dissolving incorporation by a more powerful society. One especially original aspect of this discussion is the focus on Holland and particularly its depiction in Scott's fiction as an example of industriousness without an accompanying "insatiable greed" to incorporate ever greater masses of land and peoples.</p>
<p>Narratives of union, even of the most triumphalist incorporations, however, always harbor the danger of the very impossibility of union, often "betrayed by grammar and syntax that focus attention on the nature of the spaces or interludes that frustrate the impulse to union" (13). In what is likely the richest chapter for students of Romanticism, Manning turns to "savaged texts," such as Macpherson's <em>Poems of Ossian</em>, a text of silences, fragments, and "syntactic disruptions" (149). In considering the enterprise of composing an historical national identity, Manning points out the challenge--and necessity--of translating fragments of the past into a unified national history and across cultural divides. Yet the "ruinous form" (149) if the <em>Poems of Ossian</em>, with its gaps and emptiness, underscores the unfeasibility of constructing a continuous narrative of national history, exposing the fiction of its many contemporary unionist historiographies in post-Culloden Scotland, including Hume's own <em>History of England</em>.</p>
<p>In her complex discussion of memory and identity in this chapter, Manning explores the figure of "ghosting" evident in Macpherson's texts and in those of compatriots such as Henry Mackenzie. In Scottish Enlightenment writing, she argues, ghosting represented the ways in which "[b]oth cultural and personal identity were projected in terms of similar processes of imagining ('raising up') the fragments of the past into wholeness" (166); Hume's narrative of consciousness again comes into play here. Manning sees the prevalence of the ghost as unsurprising in a mid-century Scotland that was at once obsessed with its past and invested in removing all traces of itself, particularly from the language writers used, for ghosts act as interpreters, connecting the present with the past with a communication that is always disjointed and often failed. Further, in Hume's version of consciousness, identity is produced through memory, and yet the act of unburial that is remembering also endangers the object of memory, bringing it back to the realm of the mutable, much as the exhumation of Pompeii was also, in some senses, its destruction. Think, here, of the corpse of Hogg's<em> Confessions of a Justified Sinner</em>, or more literally of the transformations in folk song culture when translated into print. Objects of sympathy and sentiment--all important to a Scottish Enlightenment worldview--and representations of ghosts and other fragments of the past turn on corrupting translations across space and time.</p>
<p>Not least of the losses in such translations is the historical specificity of a particular language, and it is through the invented notion of the analogous power and eloquence of the languages of Highlanders and savage American tribes that Manning examines the connection of the Ossian poems to Jefferson's <em>Declaration of Independence</em> and <em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em>. Jefferson, too, needed to create a community of feeling out of disparate groups, and "his solution was to adopt the discursive tactics of Scottish Enlightenment affective aesthetics: the evocation of sympathetic identity through inexpressible feeling, fragmentation, natural development savaged by violated emotions" (191), available, as he saw it, in the eloquent language of Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans. Yet where Macpherson linked sympathetic identity to the cultural representatives of a fading and soon-to-be forever lost national past, Jefferson submerged the Native Americans' loss in the "proclamation of possibility" of a newly formed nation.</p>
<p>If images of memory, fragmentation, and loss, of spectrality and imagination, bring us close to key motifs of British Romanticism--and Manning argues that "these structurally fragmenting registers of translation in Post-Culloden Scottish and early national American writing pre-formulate some of the major concerns of Romantic cultural theory" (182)--they also offer significant and, in the end, longer-lived alternatives to the formulations of major figures like Wordsworth and Coleridge. While Wordsworth hated the non-local character of Ossian's landscape, for instance, it was that very lack of specificity that "allowed readers to bring a broad range of loss-related emotions" (186) to it and facilitated Jefferson's deployment of its structures of feeling in his own writing, making, oddly, for a transnational object and form of writing. And while the broken forms of Scottish and American writings resemble those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hume and those influenced by him refused the resolving organicism of Coleridge. Scottish Enlightenment writers and the Americans influenced by them in the universities populated by Scots educators re-socialized, instead, dangerous fragmentation. Sympathy became the crucial term of an open-ended series.</p>
<p>If the question of fragmentation was posed sooner and with more urgency in Scotland than it would be in England (by the War of Independence or the French Revolution), narratives of union would have had a greater exigency in Scotland as well. And "the preoccupation with union and fragmentation" (58) persisted in Scottish and American literature much longer than it did in English literature. Final chapters on the surprising silences in Walt Whitman's seemingly all-inclusive lists and on Emily Dickinson's compelling dramatization of gaps in meaning and the meaning of gaps foresee the continuing attention to questions of fragmentation and union in modernist aesthetics. In this ground-breaking and authoritative book, Manning shows how, when told through the perspective of Scottish and American writing, the story of the dialectical tension between union and fragmentation might be more continuous and more broadly connected than previously imagined.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-7-no-1" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 7 No. 1</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/sorensen-janet">Sorensen, Janet</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/susan-manning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Manning</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/janet-sorensen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Janet Sorensen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/scottish-romanticism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scottish Romanticism</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1798" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2158" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic Romanticism</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2175" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic studies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/janet-sorensen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Janet Sorensen</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-reid" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Reid</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/susan-manning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susan Manning</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/henry-mackenzie" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Mackenzie</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/anne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Anne</a></li></ul></section>Sat, 20 Dec 2003 19:11:52 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox48834 at http://www.rc.umd.eduRichard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/richard-gravil-romantic-dialogues-anglo-american-continuities-1776%E2%80%931862
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">Richard Gravil, <em>Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862</em>. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000. xx + 250pp. $55.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-312-22716-7).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Kenneth M. Price<br />
University of Nebraska-Lincoln</h3>
<p>Richard Gravil studies English and American literature from the Revolutionary War until about the midpoint of the American Civil War. Gravil's thorough-going knowledge of connections between British and American texts enables him to create illuminating juxtapositions and to make provocative assertions.</p>
<p>This book displays the strengths and weaknesses of its biases. More interested in Romantic writers than Victorians, Gravil offers an unreconstructed view of the Romantics in his emphasis on a select few writers--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats--and he has little patience with those who would look beyond these figures. His study of literary influences is paradoxically broad and narrow at once. Expansive in its discussion of many writers on both sides of the Atlantic, <em>Romantic Dialogues</em> is also constricted in its lack of theoretical interests and its scant concern with history and politics. Gravil dismisses canonical revision and other current critical trends; for example, he belittles recent "definitions of context that take literary currencies to be of less account than those of merchant banking" (xii). He offers an insight into his overall view of literature when he describes a poem by Emily Dickinson as a "babel of 'quotation'" (199). For Gravil, literature grows out of literature: everyone quotes, echoes, alludes to, or rewrites someone else.</p>
<p>He understands "American Romanticism as a sustained effort to restate Romanticism in American terms," and though he claims that it "is not my purpose . . . to attribute every American rill to a perforation in the English tank," that is actually how the book often reads (xvi-xvii). Unable to resist the elegant put-down, he remarks, "Poe the poet is a topic I shall pass over in discreet silence" (128). And, in a similar move, instead of exploring how gender and influence intersect in the case of some notable women writers, he resorts to winks and nods. I quote a full paragraph:</p>
<blockquote><p>
For some of the writers treated in Part 2 of this study--particularly Cooper, Emerson, and Whitman--becoming an author involves a struggle between their sense of Americanness and their sense of belonging to an English literary tradition. It is marked by pugnacity in Cooper's case, a pugnacity uncomfortably at odds with his epigraphic raids upon the entire corpus of English poetry, and by transparently inefficacious denial in Emerson's. Thoreau and Hawthorne inscribe themselves with the least anxiety in an Anglo-American dialogue. That no such struggle seems to exist for Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, or Emily Dickinson, may need no comment. (67)
</p></blockquote>
<p>Given Gravil's disdain for the efforts to "recuperate such stuff" as the writings of British women poets (35), I find myself both unclear and uneasy about what he might be implying about Peabody, Fuller, and Dickinson. Is he again disparaging women writers? Is he saying that all women writers, because they are women, escape the father-son rivalry at the heart of a Bloomian model of influence? Is he suggesting something else altogether about these writers? I wish I knew. This paragraph is the final one in chapter three, and no subsequent chapter clarifies the point. My tastes, approaches, and attitudes are sufficiently different from Gravil's as to leave me unable to read his mind and bothered by the implication that anyone with half a wit would know what he means.</p>
<p>Some strengths and weaknesses of Gravil's book may be highlighted by analyzing his chapter on Whitman and Wordsworth. There is much that is sensible in the way that he absorbs and builds on the critical tradition, effectively using the work of Robert Weisbuch, John Lynen, and others. He makes a plausible and sufficiently original case for Wordsworth being the key figure behind "Song of Myself." He then discusses Whitman's emergence as a poet in light of the slavery crisis, arguing that his "response was that of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798: he snapped his squeaking baby trumpet of sedition, and began to construct a poetic persona free of his own political contradictions, and disillusionments" (164). Unfortunately, one can think of enough exceptions to this formulation as to make it of limited use: some of Whitman's poems, for example, "A Boston Ballad" and "Respondez," are full of political disillusionment. And to claim that Whitman's persona lacks political contradictions is to miss what makes the politics of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> so interesting. Gravil claims that Whitman's only figure of black self-command is the Negro drayman who appears in "Song of Myself"; the proud and indomitable Black Lucifer character of "The Sleepers" is simply overlooked. Most puzzlingly, Gravil claims that the runaway slave passage near the beginning of "Song of Myself" is an example of Whitman appropriating material from John James Audubon, though this doubtful claim is made merely via an assertion without supporting argument.</p>
<p>Gravil's discussion of Dickinson is more satisfying than his treatment of Whitman. With Dickinson he is more complex and supple, concluding that she may represent "the most extraordinary instance of a mind in persistent dialogue with a broad range of other poets in the history of Anglo-American lyricism" (191). He has mastered that portion of Dickinson criticism that treats her responses to British writers. Though illuminating, his approach is nonetheless strangely divorced from much of history: no mention is made of Emily's key relationship with Susan Gilbert Huntington Dickinson, the recipient of many of her poems and the focus of her emotional life, and he ignores the Civil War context and the racial and political issues of her time. We can learn a great deal from studying Dickinson in terms of her reading, but such a perspective can also mask other forces that profoundly influenced her poetry. Gravil's lack of interest in the texture of Dickinson's life is consistent with his neglect of her writing practices. That is, Dickinson was a manuscript poet whose writings, as many recent critics have argued, has been distorted to a lesser or greater extent by print editions of her work. Curiously, despite a lively and ongoing critical controversy about the editing of Dickinson, Gravil quotes from the Thomas Johnson edition of her poetry as if it were not at all problematic.</p>
<p>Richard Gravil's work takes its place on the small shelf of books that treat the intersection of British and American literature in the nineteenth century. Gravil adds significantly to our knowledge of cross-Atlantic connections and lays the groundwork for new considerations of an obviously important but strangely neglected field of study. Despite some shortcomings, <em>Romantic Dialogues</em> is a significant contribution that is certain to provoke ongoing dialogue of its own.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-5-no-3" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 5 no. 3</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/price-kenneth-m">Price, Kenneth M.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/richard-gravil" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Gravil</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/kenneth-m-price" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kenneth M. Price</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2158" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic Romanticism</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/transatlanticism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlanticism</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-lynen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Lynen</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-gravil" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Gravil</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/kenneth-m-price" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kenneth M. Price</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/emily-dickinson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Emily Dickinson</a></li></ul></section>Mon, 30 Sep 2002 16:58:39 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox48577 at http://www.rc.umd.eduTeresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nationhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/teresa-goddu-gothic-america-narrative-history-and-nation
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="caption" class="alignleft" width="239">Teresa A. Goddu, <em>Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation</em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). x + 224pp. $45.00 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-231-10816-8). $16.50 (Pap; ISBN: 0-231-10817-6).</div>
<h3>Reviewed by<br />
Dennis Berthold<br />
Texas A&amp;M University</h3>
<p>In <em>Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination</em> (Harvard University Press, 1992), Toni Morrison calls for greater attention to the place of race and slavery in classic American literature: "The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination" (5). Teresa Goddu's book answers that call by grounding nineteenth-century American gothicism in the history and politics of American racialism. In America, Goddu argues, the gothic stands as an elaborate code for slavery, race, and oppression, including the oppression by the new capitalist marketplace and its consequence, rampant literary commercialism. Goddu's fundamental aim is to historicize the gothic, to situate it within a particular social and political milieu and show how "American gothic literature criticizes America's national myth of new-world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions that undermine the nation's claim to purity and equality" (10). By rendering Julia Kristeva's notion of the "abject" (or "horror of being") into concrete, historical narratives, American gothic tales expose the American nightmare even as they mask it with the modes of popular fiction and fantasy. Goddu moves the gothic from the margins to the center of American literary history, and to the already considerable literature studying the gothic's psychological role adds an argument for its social function.</p>
<p>Separate chapters focus on St. Jean de Crèvecoeur's famous description of the caged slave in <em>Letters from an American Farmer</em> (1782), Charles Brockden Brown's metaphors of a diseased economy in <em>Arthur Mervyn</em> (1800), John Neal's images of Indian-Anglo savagery in <em>Logan</em> (1822), Edgar Allan Poe's overt racialization of the gothic in <em>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</em> (1838), Nathaniel Hawthorne's and Louisa May Alcott's contrasting adaptations of the gothic to a marketplace dominated by sentimental literature in <em>The Blithedale Romance</em> (1852) and Alcott's ghost stories, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's <em>Uncle Tom's Cabin</em> (1852) and Harriet Jacobs's <em>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</em> (1861) and their differing appropriations of gothic devices to provide "haunting" memories of slavery. Throughout, Goddu corrects earlier critics who either ignored race or marginalized it, along with the gothic. Her best example is Poe, whom F. O. Matthiessen and others treated as a Southern regionalist in order to isolate the racialism that, Goddu believes, was central to American literary nationalism. Less persuasively, she finds Neal's exclusion from the canon proof that "The Indian and the gothic imagery—'dark and gloomy mythologies'—associated with him are viewed as antagonistic to American literature's prospects and principles" (72). Rather than producing regeneration through violence, as Richard Slotkin argues, the gothic reveals American innocence as a thin veil hiding the ineluctable corruption and degeneracy at the new nation's heart. Only by denying the gothic's presence and power could critics construct an American canon consonant with American ideals.</p>
<p>Most broadly, Goddu's book takes its place in the renascent historicism in American studies to counter the tradition of psychological and formalist critics who focused on American literature as "a world elsewhere," in Richard Poirier's phrase, a world that had more to do with individual eccentricities and bizarre fantasies than social realities, a world of art rather than life, of self rather than society, of personality rather than politics. The whole tradition of contrasting the American "romance" to the British "novel" rests on this analysis, and contributes powerfully to the hoary myth of American exceptionalism. American critics, by identifying the gothic with the romance, have defused the gothic's powerful symbolic unmasking of racial atrocity and commercial dehumanization. Goddu draws on the work of Joan Dayan, Dana Nelson, and an astonishing range of other contemporary critics to counter gothicists like Leslie Fiedler who privileged the psychological over the political and largely ignored social realities.</p>
<p>Even though the racial argument frames the discussion, I found this the least original part of the book. Coding "gothic" as "racial," so that the "power of blackness," for example, connotes fears of slave revolt, risks a linguistic circularity that evades the very historical conditions it seeks to expose. If every instance of "black," "dark," "shade," or even "slave" inexorably connotes American chattel slavery, racial themes (let alone gothicism) become so omnipresent that we forget that many Americans were truly blind to race, and much popular literature deliberately sought to escape social realities (try to find racial themes in Joseph Rodman Drake's "The Culprit Fay," one of the most popular poems of the 1830s). Such willful denial of social realities (both in the literature and the critical tradition that canonized it) strikes me as at least as culturally significant as the overt depictions of racial oppression that have characterized American literature from the beginning, for instance William Bradford's description of the Pequot massacre in his history <em>Of Plimoth Plantation</em> (1620–1647), or Philip Freneau's vividly gothic anti-slavery poem "To Sir Toby" (1792), neither of which Goddu mentions. Yet these and many similar works are staples in American literary anthologies precisely because they dramatically illustrate the dark side of American culture. Substituting metaphors and generic codings for direct discourse valuably extends racial themes in literature, but it risks robbing them of their political urgency and historical force.</p>
<p>More provocative for me are Goddu's linkages of gothic with the emergent capitalistic marketplace, particularly in her subtle and double-edged readings of the Hawthorne-Alcott texts. Making good use of biographical and cultural context, Goddu prefaces this discussion with a brilliant but too-brief analysis of female statuary, finding in such sentimentalized works as Hiram Powers's <em>The Greek Slave</em> (1844) an eroticized and commodified feminine that opposed the domestic ideal of the "angel in the house." As a medium that unveils femininity only to enclose it within the male gaze and an unfeeling commercialism, such statues embody the same paradoxes as Hawthorne's veiled ladies, who participate in the marketplace only if they are (disingenuously) separated from it by a theatrical veil. As a gothic device, the veil signifies the "magical world of the marketplace" and becomes a key image contrasting Hawthorne's failure with Alcott's success in satisfying their audience's demands for sentimental fiction (119). Although Goddu perpetuates the overemphasis on Hawthorne's reaction to the "mob of scribbling women," she draws a telling contrast between male and female authors' abilities to accommodate the shifting tastes of the reading public.</p>
<p>Curiously, Goddu's approach reinforces American exceptionalism by treating slavery, racialism, and capitalism as strictly American phenomena, an exclusionary practice that implicitly argues for a "gothic" that develops independently of British (or other) generic and social practices. American writers knew better. Hawthorne's <em>The House of the Seven Gables</em> (1851) locates class oppression in seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a century before <em>The Castle of Otranto</em> (1765), and Herman Melville unmasks Spanish, African, and Roman Catholic complicity in slavery in "Benito Cereno" (1855–56). The romance tradition that Goddu and other new historicists have criticized for the last twenty years, politically blind as it sometimes was, demonstrated the power of genres to cross cultures and transmute social reality into defamiliarized forms. Moreover, romance foregrounds the subjectively shaping power of language, not only in fictional narratives, but in historical discourse as well. Sophisticated romance theorists like Edgar Dryden and Emily Budick Miller have shown how all history depends on textuality, and as such is fraught with subjectivity and instability. Goddu acknowledges the reciprocal relationship of event and narrative when she says that "history invents the gothic, and in turn the gothic reinvents history" (132). Yet when she goes on to speak of a "gothic event" (146), she implies an essential quality to the gothic that infuses acts themselves, regardless of how they are represented. When is violence simply bloody and horrible and revolting, and not "gothic"? If the answer is "never," then too many distinctions have been lost, which may satisfy the demands of poststructuralist theory but trivializes literary analysis. For this reason, I wish Goddu had said more about "Benito Cereno," for by layering fiction over legal document over autobiography over experience, Melville's story recognizes the constructedness of <em>both</em> the act and its representation and questions the efficacy of all modes of perception.</p>
<p><em>Gothic America</em> contains a long and valuable bibliography, testimony to Goddu's wide reading in the field and her ready familiarity with contemporary theory. Typically Goddu cites earlier critics primarily to discredit them, without acknowledging, as one might expect of an historicist, their embeddedness in cultural politics. The early progressivist critic V. L. Parrington, for example, is cited on Poe's irrationality, and the popular biographer Montrose Moses on Poe's regionalism, when no knowledgeable Poe scholar has taken either Parrington or Moses seriously for years. Goddu chastises more formidable critics like Leslie Fiedler for placing too little stress on race, but fails to acknowledge Fiedler's enormous contribution to the advancement of Native American and Jewish American literature. As in her frequent complaints that Americanists have neglected the gothic (while she neglects to cite Jane Lundblad's early work on Hawthorne's gothic devices), these instances occur frequently enough to make one suspect she has, in places, erected a straw man.</p>
<p>This is, nevertheless, a valuable work. Goddu raises the question of whether an American gothic could have existed without a "Gothic America," that is, an America riddled with the contradictions of slavery and nascent market capitalism; in so doing, she also raises the larger historicist question, what are the <em>necessary</em> (rather than defining) social, political, and cultural conditions of the gothic? Addressing these issues might help us better understand the pervasive appeal of a Stephen King or Anne Rice in our own time, and might thereby offer insights (however disconcerting) into the state of our own conflicted culture. Goddu's study demonstrates one way of doing this, and might be profitably followed in further analyses of the interdependence of culture and form.</p>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-volume-and-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Volume and Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/reviews-blog-categories/vol-1-no-3" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vol. 1 No. 3</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/berthold-dennis">Berthold, Dennis</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reviews</div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/dennis-berthold" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis Berthold</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/tags/teresa-a-goddu" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Teresa A. Goddu</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tags/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1359" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gothic</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/arthur-gordon-pym" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arthur Gordon Pym</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/edgar-allan-poe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edgar Allan Poe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/teresa-goddu" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Teresa Goddu</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nathaniel-hawthorne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nathaniel Hawthorne</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/julia-kristeva" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Julia Kristeva</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/harriet-beecher-stowe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harriet Beecher Stowe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/leslie-fiedler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Leslie Fiedler</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/harriet-jacobs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harriet Jacobs</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-neal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Neal</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/toni-morrison" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Toni Morrison</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/louisa-may-alcott" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louisa May Alcott</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/dennis-berthold" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis Berthold</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 07 Jul 1998 04:27:08 +0000Jeffrey N. Cox35543 at http://www.rc.umd.edu